Don't know why i found it hard to grasp the ghist of this but.. he buys second hand items (paying before receiving) and then sell them at higher price on his own (in-app) store (if they arrive)?
If that's the case, such a system would depend on people being honest. In Japan, this provenly work, maybe even in Sweden - but in less honest countries, i really doubt it.
I would say it takes a while until scammers get noticed. Usually anything worth scamming has a scammer around it since many times the scammer is an inside man.
Most people are honest, but it only takes a couple of bad apples to spoil the entire barrel. eBay 15 years ago was so much more awesome than the eBay of today.
Is that really because of honesty? or because ebay allowed vendors?
or, is it really because eBay is a more complete marketplace now, with better information, in many ways it is more efficient, and arbitrage opportunities are lower, and market pricing prevails more often. But...it almost seems like less efficient markets are more fun to play in.
This may be a stupid comparison, but a microcosm of this might be the experience of the World of Warcraft Auction House vs the Diablo 3 one. In WoW, the market rates differed hugely by server (realm), and were influenced by drop rate, population, and relative maturity of the realm (e.g. mostly low-level or mostly high level). In short, the pricing mechanics were simple, and the supply was constrained and grokkable. It was also only fake money (aside from the gold farming, which wasn't sanctioned).
BUT, in D3, the drop rates were more random, the population on the AH was giant relative to WoW, and people were playing with real money. As a result, the market got efficient quickly, and the the pricing adjusted very quickly such that it was no fun to play. the drop rates were so low for items that of high enough quality that it wasn't worth participating as a buyer or seller unless you were only in it for the money.
> eBay 15 years ago was so much more awesome than the eBay of today.
That's simply not true.
There is so much more available on eBay now. I do almost all of my shopping on eBay because it presents a consistent user interface, with a quick checkout flow, and good competition between vendors to keep the prices down.
...and I have abandoned eBay entirely, due to my perception that's its a hive of villainy. Folks listing computer equipment for sale above the regular price. Auctions that routinely go for more than you can easily buy elsewhere. Insincere bidders that try to con sellers into cancelling a bid (thus ensuring their confederate will now win, with a bid well below the value of the item). And so on.
In many jurisdictions there's a major problem with taxation: if you sell something from a person to another, you can usually do it tax free, at least on a small scale. If you create a company to facilitate this process, and the company acts as a middle man by buying the things from one person and selling them to another, the company probably needs to pay value added tax from the sale. In Finland, for example, that's a 23% added cost. And if you take commission, you'll need to pay the tax for that as well.
The laws vary hugely based on city/county/state/country and purpose of sale, but in my experience in the US you are almost always required to report income made from personal sales and pay income tax on it, and the person who bought it from you is supposed to pay sales tax. Sometimes there is a quantity exception, fewer than x sales and/or lower than y total value. With trades it is much murkier but in my experience not required.
Not to say I do or that the tax man will ever come for me, but the laws are there.
Considering the wave of scammer responses every time I try to sell even the most trivial thing on craigslist nowadays, I highly doubt such a pay-first scheme will survive very long if someone were to try it in the US.
At best, maybe it could be a loss-leading gimmicky feature to drive traffic to less easily gamed traditional ecommerce aspects.
You might be able work around this by striking a deal with the company handling the transit. If there's a pick up service, the guy doing the pickup could make a quick check on the goods and release the payment. This of course does not help for issues like selling pirated goods, which can't be detected on quick inspection.
My gut feeling is that large part of business comes from regular customers. I guess the probability to cheat goes significantly down on each subsequent trade.
I think this works well in a relatively homogenous society like Japan. Do you think this would take off in the USA? Maybe if you restricted selling to the local neighbourhood store.
Canada is more diverse than the USA, so every time (and it happens a lot for some reason) someone says "That couldn't happen in the USA because it's not homogenous" I always compare it to Canada, which generally seems to be the country that actually is what the USA advertises itself to be.
Latin America's population is ~650 million. Canada intentionally designed its immigration system to be exclusionary to immigration by poorer people. Which is why, during the time in which the US massively boomed with Latin American immigration (1970s forward), Canada did not.
How can there be 650 million people in Latin American, nearly 70 million hispanics in the US, and only ~450,000 hispanics in Canada? A skill & education restricted immigration system that doesn't allow in typically poorer, lower skill, lower education hispanics coming from Latin America. It's extremely anti-diversity.
People of Chinese, East Indian, First Nations, Ukrainian, Dutch, Polish & Filipino ancestry all make up a bigger proportion of Canada's population than hispanic or black people. Your own numbers only add up to 81% for Canada but 93% for the USA. That's people from as propontionally large a group as African-Americans in the USA that you've skipped over.
Possibly there's two layers of miscommunication about "diverse". One, people could consider Scots, Irish, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Welsh, Norweigan people to be non-diverse if they fit some social category of whiteness. Even if one of the groups still speaks it's own language and has a seperatist movement.
Second, having big chunks of certain demographics could be considered less diversity than having lots of little chunks from different places.
Facts are facts. Canada's immigration system is absurdly anti-diversity, which is why Canada has so few hispanic and black people, and why it's nearly 80% white.
Within about 20 years, the US won't even be a majority white nation. Pretending Canada is more diverse than that, is ridiculous. That Canada is somehow a super diverse nation, is a pretend claim that is unsupported by the actual demographic facts.
Why don't more poor black people immigrate into Canada from cities like Detroit, Chicago or New York? Surely their lives would be considerably improved given Canada's superior safety net, healthcare system, etc. - and Canada has good wages and a healthy unemployment rate. It's simple, they're not allowed to. Canada's immigration system excludes the possibility that most people with lower skill & education backgrounds can ever get in.
If Canada were actually pro-diversity, they'd liberalize their immigration policies and let in a large amount of immigration from Latin America (after all, the vast majority of the Americas is hispanic), such that Canada's hispanic percentage closes the gap with the US over the next 20-30 years. They're never going to allow it.
"Diversity" in your example seems to include black people and hispanic people, but disregards the diversity in "white" culture (there's a huge split between English and French), and the entire Asian continent.
Denying people of low skill and educational backgrounds isn't inherently racist - an African-American software developer gets the same NAFTA rubber-stamp as a Polish-American developer. French-speaking workers have it even easier, as French-speakers get preferential treatment. (Areas of Africa natively speak French, if you're insistent that Africa is the source of all "diversity".)
I don't see how letting low-skill, uneducated people immigrate to a country helps it. Immigration isn't a charity.
Yes, facts are indeed facts, let's agree on that at least.
The USA has always been partly hispanic, from before there was a USA. That might have something to do with their presence in the country today.
Similarly, I don't think the African-American presence in the USA can be put down to a pro-diversity immigration system, unless we're really twisting those words meanings. Indeed America has a long history of having openly and literally racist immigration laws.
Either way, we seem to be retreating from "this can't happen in the USA because it's diverse" to "there's poor people in America", which seems like a different argument entirely.
It's worth noting that half of American Hispanics identify as "white" to the census, since it asks for race and ethnicity seperately (i.e. you can be black and hispanic too) The census actually counts 90% of Hispanics as white, because their answers (mostly "other race") don't fit better in any other category.
Taking that into account, the USA is either 70% or 78% white. (And presumably that bumps Canada up to 78.7% or so too.)
It is mentioned, but there's not a lot of detail. This seems to be the juiciest paragraph concerning the actual business:
All told, less than 1 in 10 second-hand-goods sellers didn’t deliver as promised. That was good enough for Mitsumoto, who relaunched the service, called Cash, in August as a new way to gather inventory for an online flea market. Total daily purchases are capped at 10 million yen, and are limited to smartphones, luxury handbags, watches, clothing and other specific items from a list of several thousand. Customers take a photo and are given a non-negotiable offer. Prices are set automatically based on data gleaned from other second-hand marketplaces and Cash makes money by reselling the goods.
Even if they didn't, it attracts a lot of customers to their second hand store where they don't "have" to sell the used goods but can sell new stuff with a (predictable) margin.
Is this like a Craigslist, with option to pre-pay? If so, it would be a convenient way to reserve something instead of racing out to the actual seller's location first. I don't know how many times I went to the seller's house only to find out that it was sold earlier that day. I once drove almost 2 hours to buy a used car, which I confirmed it was available before I left the house, only to find that it was sold by the time I got there.
Interesting, Yardsale founders created another app that IIRC basically did this. It never took off for some reason but I thought it was great to get an instant buy and pickup for electronics.
If that's the case, such a system would depend on people being honest. In Japan, this provenly work, maybe even in Sweden - but in less honest countries, i really doubt it.